wheezy and Sound

[Martin McCormick]

One thing I know is that if pulseaudio is working, you get
/dev/dsp devices for each working sound card. These are the
standard PCM audio devices for sound card I/O. If alsa is
working but pulseaudio is not installed, the standard devices do
not exist but alsa and all its control mechanisms such as
amixer appear to work. I seem to recall that play and record
also worked. Basically everything else seems to rely on alsa
being sane.

	The kernel modules that support the software speech
appear to presently be the only working pieces of the audio
system.

	A few years ago, I installed Lenny on a system and
neglected to install pulseaudio. I seem to recall that amixer
worked fine and I could play some sound files but there were no
standard audio devices. Someone told me I needed pulseaudio and
that did the trick.

	This time, alsa is broken so nothing that depends on it
can work. There have never yet been any /dev/dsp device files
and alsa gives every appearance of being totally broken.

martin